Can someone please simplify the income tax form? Please!

Nearly 30 years have passed since the late Utah Sen. Bob Bennett told the Deseret News he thought the idea of reducing the standard income tax form to the size of postcard would become a major part of the 1996 presidential election.
We suspect he wasn’t the first politician with that idea, but we know he wasn’t the last. Five years ago, then-president Trump promised the card during a speech in West Virginia, telling the audience, “This will be the last time — April — be the last time that you’re going to go that old-fashioned, big, lots of pages, complicated tax form. Because next April you’re going to, in many cases, one page, one card.”
And yet, despite those tantalizing wishes from leaders in Washington, things have gone in the opposite direction instead, and not in a slow, creeping fashion.
According to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, the amazing increases in technology since 1996 — including electronic filing — haven’t been able to keep up with the increases in tax complications, making the process of filing a return even more difficult and time-consuming.
A new report found that 94% of individual federal returns today are prepared using software and 90% are filed electronically. And yet, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs estimates that this year, Americans will spend more than 7.9 billion hours combined complying with IRS filing and reporting requirements.
To put it differently, all this work is the equivalent of “3.8 million full-time workers doing nothing but tax return paperwork — roughly equal to the population of Los Angeles and nearly 46 times the workforce at the IRS.”
People tend to howl about all of this in the springtime, as filing deadlines loom. But here we are, in the middle of another presidential election season, and neither major candidate is addressing this issue.
That’s inexcusable, because the costs of these complications are staggering.
The Tax Foundation went the extra step of calculating how much it would take to pay someone a reasonable hourly wage to work those 7.9 billion hours the nation spends preparing forms. Then it added the $133 billion Americans actually do spend for tax preparation. The result is a combined $546 billion in real or opportunity costs just to pay taxes each year.
If you’re cynical and inclined to sneer that this is an insignificant drop in the bucket compared to what Washington spends each year, the truth is this figure is almost 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product, or, in other words, its economic output.
The foundation also spelled out the importance of those opportunity costs. “Every hour spent complying with tax forms and returns is an hour that parents cannot spend with their families or business owners cannot spend growing their firm,” the report said.
That’s an enormous price for filling out forms.
So, why has Washington not followed through on promises to simplify the income tax?
Last spring, a story in The Wall Street Journal said, “The tax code reflects the intricacies of modern financial and social life, and it’s also a mishmash of competing policy interests that shift over time and often interact in unexpected ways.”
That doesn’t completely explain why Estonia is able to send its citizens returns each year that are already filled in with numbers. People may challenge the figures, if they choose, but the chances of being fined for underpaying are greatly reduced.
Nor does it explain why complicated lifestyles in the U.S. necessarily have to translate into complicated tax forms.
The story also blamed human nature. “The rock-bottom reality is that no matter how much taxpayers decry tax complexity, few object to it when they benefit.”
It’s true that industries and interest groups lobby for tax breaks and wage public relations battles when their existing breaks are threatened. But Americans elect members of Congress to lead, and that includes doing the difficult task of confronting interest groups.
No one could credibly argue that it’s OK for 2% of the nation’s GDP to be wasted on nothing more than preparing tax forms. Maybe a postcard-sized tax return is too big an ask, but Congress and the president could at least take some steps toward simplification, rather than always heading in the other direction.
In any case, we would like to hear more candidates this year talking about it.